Editorial Note: Republishing Review of Naveen Kishore’s Book of Poetry Knotted Grief from old AnankeWLF website. New website and information about Ananke Literature Festival Coming Soon.
Meditative pauses, abrupt halts, soulful variations, and metaphoric juxtapositions weave the lilting fabric of lyricism that makes up Knotted Grief.
More than a book of poems, it is a moving rendition that goes beyond line, meter, and length. The artist tentatively unclasps the twists of despair and the tightly fastened boughs of despondency—perhaps singular marks of reconciliation for our collective humanity—and only when undone do the gnarly knots turn into specks of dust drawn in… by the reader. Capitulated!
When tasked with penning a review for a work of literature, one might indeed find the exercise thrilling. Unraveling creations as riveting as Knotted Grief takes one on a soul-searching journey, navigating not just through one’s own experiences of the “whips and scorns of time,” but also through the “crooked timber of humanity” that led philosophers of old to surmise that no straight thing can ever be made.
Cover designed by Sunandini Banerjee
Naveen Kishore – Founder Seagull Books
But perhaps that is what Naveen is compelling us to comprehend and make sense of. Life seeks no sensibility! Existence is… like the “sun shrouded in a cloak of night refusing point blank to rise” [pg 9]… reluctantly awaiting to be violently birthed and weaned from the womb.
Words coerce us to contemplate and discern what ought to be crystal clear. Is it not as “transparent” [pg 3] as the “crumpled sheet of light” [pg 17] that “ricochets” in a “room made vacant, made lonely…”? Is it not true that our only respite from the compulsively addictive morbidity of mortality is through “death’s soft whisper” [pg 7]? Perchance… life is… (or has metamorphosed into?) “the room emptied of thought… all of it” or a “landscape of green” where “crushed underfoot leaves” are “daring to breathe.”
Deep and bewildering though grief may be, it is as visceral as it is constant. It is a solace for the “young widow” who “waits and waits” [pg 3] with sweet sorrow keeping her company, and a placating comfort even for the “wounded earth awaiting the onslaught of winter snow” [pg 50]. Grief is life’s constant, ever-trusted companion, entwined with it in an eternal, Quasimodic embrace that turns into ashes when separated. What is grief but a healing salve for the soul, scouring away the violations of life? Life is like a book of “yellowed pages” containing “freshly pressed petals” replacing “older, dried, brittle flowers… gathering dust and silverfish,” yet sanctioning affliction as one traverses through it—flicking through—with fingers “full of papercuts” [pg 81].
Knotted Grief by Naveen Kishore is a “mirror vast and silent”—and yet truly evocative as it compassionately speaks volumes of anguished pain, desolate yearnings, and a deep sense of loss that is irreparable in spaces that are both intimate and personal as well as open and collective.
Buy your copy of Knotted Grief, published by Speaking Tiger, from Amazon.in or direct from the publisher’s website.
